She's heard from victims who hadn't even known how to say what had happened to them.

In the week since her article on "stealthing," or secretly removing a condom during sex, appeared in the Columbia Journal of Gender and Law, Yale Law School graduate Alexandra Brodsky has drawn international media coverage and ignited impassioned discussion of what had been an obscure form of sexual violation. She's also heard from more than two dozen victims, including some men.

"I've heard from a lot of people, and that's what makes this work worth it — that's why we do it," said Brodsky.

"I've heard from a number of people who said, 'I felt terribly betrayed, but I didn't know what to call it, so I didn't know I was right to be angry, right to be hurt.' And I've heard from someone who is planning to bring the article to a lawyer and hoping to take legal action against the wrongdoer."

If that case proceeds, it will be a first. There's no known record of a U.S. court being asked to consider a condom removal case, Brodsky said. Her journal article details several approaches that might work in court and argues for a civil law explicitly forbidding the practice.

Brodsky said she first became concerned about violent or disrespectful sexual practices that don't fit into familiar categories when she was in law school in her early 20s. She was hearing from friends and classmates about disturbing under-the-radar behaviors.

The victims she interviewed for the journal article saw condom removal as a clear violation of both trust and bodily autonomy. They also feared unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.

"It was such a blatant violation of what we'd agreed to," one victim told Brodsky. "I set a boundary. I was very explicit."

Brodsky found a website dedicated to tricking women into having sex without condoms and quotes the man who runs the site as saying, "Stealthing is controversial, but it's also a reality. If you want to do it, you need to know how."

Brodsky says she doesn't use the term "stealthing."

"I think that it trivializes the harm, and I don't want to give the wrongdoers control over how we talk about the problem. ... It's violent, and I think it's important to name violence as such, and that we use words that make clear what's going on," she said.

Nonconsensual condom removal is nothing new, Brodsky said. But we're still in the relatively early days of speaking openly about sexual and gender violence.

"I'm not expecting a law review article to suddenly change everything, but I think having words can help us talk about it," she said. "How do you talk about what happened if you don't know what it's called?"

Ahh Valentine's Day, the holiday of love. It gets one thinking about weddings, which gets one thinking about honeymoons. And, in that regard, Lonely Planet has got you. If you pick up its latest book, "The Honeymoon Handbook," you may pick up some pointers on 'mooning the best way possible. And if island life is your idea of fun for two, this list is for you.

(Darcel Rockett)

Instagram has gone to the dogs. Well, and the cats.

We scoured the social media app to find some of Chicagoland's most adorable — and famous — fur babies. From a partially blind husky named Kaney to a cat named after a duck with more than 10K followers, the Windy City has adorableness from the Gold Coast to Oak Park.

A version of this article appeared in print on May 03, 2017, in the Health & Family section of the Chicago Tribune with the headline "Bringing ‘stealthing' out of the shadows" —
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